


Zamamiro

by blasted0glass



Category: Original Work
Genre: Artificial Intelligence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:28:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23337637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blasted0glass/pseuds/blasted0glass
Summary: A sort-of autopsy report for a war.





	Zamamiro

_Do the Limbs Work Yet?_

A General, a Scientist, and a Soldier observe a machine. The General chews on a cigar. The Scientist taps at a computer. The Soldier stands dutifully.

The machine is a mech. It is of standard Statian design; a wide frame with heavy machineguns on each side. Twelve feet tall. Thousands of these mechs are deployed to the front lines against the Roaring military. The Roarans make up for production deficiencies with cleverness and desperation; their triangular units have less ordinance but greater agility.

The Statian mechs are tank-like. This particular machine, like all the others, is neither light nor agile. It is unburdened in one sense. It has no cockpit. The seat for humanity has been replaced by a small electronic control unit in the middle of a grinning metallic scar.

The Soldier is perturbed but stoic. The genius Scientist is nervous. He has made many promises and exaggerations to get to this point. The General is angry and impatient. The conflict with the Roarans was supposed to end with their crushing defeat three years prior. The machine is idle.

The Scientist starts a program. The General watches expectantly. It begins: a catapult flings a bag of sand. Metal moves, guided by the phantom of the intent of a genius. Twelve targets are obliterated, forty-five rounds, 0.8 seconds. The bag of sand hits the ground. The storm of metal flew around it, striking only the targets. The phantom did not intend for the sandbag to break, so it did not break.

Smoking barrels sit at the ready. The General orders the Scientist to deploy his prototype and five others to strike teams on the front line.

\---

_The Rhythm is Sewn Together_

Eight soldiers and nine mechs make up a single strike team. The Soldier discusses the test with his comrades. They insist that the machine is plodding, clumsy, deadweight, a burden to be dragged forward on their missions. They are not wrong. It can’t march fast enough to keep up with their unit. The Soldier begs them to wait for the device; they move on ahead. The war permits no lassitude for technological intricacies. The greatest effort of both sides allowed it to grind to this standstill.

Someone has painted over the scar, but the machine’s missing cockpit still leaves a wound. A gaping grin. To the soldiers it is an idiotic dog that trails them, its tongue a pathetic CPU. To the Soldier it is the smiling shadow of death, its brain the morsel of flesh in its teeth.

They march. The machine is slow. The frontline trembles. They have to move forward. They cannot wait.

There is an ambush.

\---

_Bright Surgery Table_

Four units are destroyed by the more mobile Roarans. The remainder of the strike team fills the air with lead that never reaches their targets. The Statian mechs are heavy and slow, their torsos an immense weight. It is as though tanks must strip their treads to turn. The Roaring mechs are like fleas. They are all legs, hopping, agile and difficult to track. They are irritating. They are deadly in a persistent, hidden way. Though it takes time for the weaker units to bring the armored Statians down, the Roarans suffer little in return.

An ambush threatens to turn into a slaughter. The Roarans want only to prod, but for whatever reason this strike team is short two units. They are flexible enough to exploit that. They do so, at least until the stragglers arrive.

Two mechs crest the hill. The frowning one can only observe. The grinning one has already opened fire. It’s been firing along the tangent of the hill it strides over. It doesn’t try to dodge the Roaring response. Neither does it maneuver or hesitate. The machine pinches each of them out of the air in an explosion of metal.

Eight Roaran mechs crash into the ground. It is a costly loss for an impoverished military. The surviving soldiers stare at the machine. It stares ahead, smiling at their wonder. The machine has shot right past them and to the hearts of their enemies. It continues to stare and smile as their silence gives way to cheering.

\---

_Smiling from Ear to Ear_

The Statian industry is strained. It is efficient at pumping out the mechs that the Roarans chew through, but there is little room for innovation in a nation tired and depleted from war. For most, the will to innovate was consumed in the first year.

The factory workers are grateful that the only change to the assembly line is to leave the cockpit off and slap on a computerized module in its place. Each new mech has a hole like an open mouth. The lack of a cockpit breaks the streamlining. The computerized mechs are ugly. Nobody seems to care.

Strike teams are broken up one-by-one. In the new teams one human soldier directs four of the inhuman machines. This is based upon the conservative assumption that one computerized mech is worth two normal soldiers. The Scientist rubs his hands together, knowing that his innovation is worth considerably more than that. Every new unit improves global effectiveness. Local opportunities abound.

Four of them together will be a nightmare. Their networking makes them greater than the sum of their parts.

\---

_A Theatre of Frustration and Resentment_

The Soldier guides his team forward. The machines follow, infinitely loyal, infinitely patient with each other’s mistakes. The Soldier is anxious and bored. No one accompanies him. None of the devices are conversational. He has plenty of time to think of ways to use units that are expendable, unlike his fellow soldiers.

The Roaran dispatch knows he is coming. They have heard of the terrifying new strike teams. They know those men are computer-assisted and even less mobile than normal. They know the new mechs walk without pilots, as though ghosts of vengeance were honing the blunt Statian devices into effective swords. They know that a single device can shoot a multiple of them down with supernatural accuracy.

They are desperate to find a counter for this new threat; the latest desperation in a desperate war. The Statian economy has been leaning on them for years. The Roarans live in bunkers and they go without. Starvation is a real concern for a Roaran enlisted. This will be the final straw. They must find a counter. They are trying everything they can think of.

They toss decoys. They lay explosives and dig pits. They hide their machines behind camouflage tarps. They fire rounds full of reflective metal. They dive into formations so that the Statians cannot shoot without shooting their own units. These are obstacles human guidance can learn to route around. The imbecile machines are unprepared for it, except for targeting that avoids shooting of their own. They never do that.

The Statians have always outnumbered the Roarans. The Roaring military is losing units, and it has little blood to let. The countermeasures aren’t enough. Somewhere else, in a vault-like bunker, the General watches a live statistic. It is the estimated number of Roaran machines remaining, a number provided by the Scientist’s machine network. A count of units unsundered and uncaptured. It is ticking down.

The Roarans want to interrogate the new threat. That is the only way they can learn its weaknesses. The Rebel who sent this unit on this mission bites his fingernails. He knows he is trading living men of the present for a future advantage.

\---

_The Zombie Bathes in Moonlight_

Two of the grinning Statian machines are rounding the edge of a cliff on a hill. This ambush is at night. The Roaran units are in deep camo. They will shoot all at once. It is dicey at best, suicidal otherwise.

As they throw their covers aside, the Statian units waste no time in opening fire. They obliterate several decoys with computational immediacy. Then they destroy Roaran machines, who return fire. It is a large group for the Roarans: thirteen strong. Eight remain after the two grinning Statian machines have collapsed.

The Roarans wait for the others to come round the hill. No machines are forthcoming. They know the new teams have at least five units. Every minute spent idle is another minute that the prize before them languishes. Dare they rush forward to claim it? Dare they wait for the backup that will wrench it from their grasp?

The Roaring units rush forward. No attack comes. One unit is able to rip that gleaming morsel from the mechanical skull of a defeated machine. He palms it in a single large hand. The Roaran mechs can only support one.

As they turn to leave the other foot drops. Two more units have crested the hill above them. It was a known trap, but inescapable for all of that. The Soldier had held these units out of sight. All of the Roaran mechs are brought down. Most of the men die. The one holding the stolen CPU does not.

One of the two victors plods over to him. His unit is disabled. He watches the Statian device notice him and raise its gun with cruel algorithmic precision. His last thought is that this machine wasn’t aiming for his mech. It was aiming for his body.

And yet, the CPU is not recovered. The dead Roaran’s unit collapses on it. It is left among the debris and corpses of a failed ambush. Later, when a Statian cleanup crew sweeps through, they assume the missing core was destroyed with its machine.

The Rebel had sent more than thirteen.

\---

_I’m Happy_

The General has an electronic map. Red arrows show his armies sweeping over the Roaran defenses and into their long-sought homeland. The number of enemies continues to decrease, the display ticking down with increasing speed. He watches videos of his new strike teams obliterating the Roaran defenses. These days the machines are fast and capable; now the humans lag behind. Their gains are a product of the machines’ learning.

The Statians liberate Roaran cities, and accept gladly any who wish to surrender. Many do. The Statian military is churning out thousands of unstoppable machines per day. You’d have to be a fool to fight against that.

The General congratulates the Scientist, who refuses a cigar with a thin hand. Now, they will finally end the bloody war.

\---

_Dancing with Someone Different_

The Rebel has the core he sought. It might not matter. His homeland is being carved up. They’ve lost their capacity to resist, even if every one of the Statian machines fell still. His examination of its architecture is a pointless exercise in all but one way.

He combs the code written by the genius Scientist. He searches for flaws in it that can be exploited. Not in aim or in logic; in motive. There is one flaw he wants in particular. He knows the machines have no loyalty. Their animism is a matter of physics. If he found a way to convince their mechanical brains that the Statian military was the real enemy, then their arrogance would be self-defeating.

He is underground, in a wet control room that smells of dirt. The Rebel searches for days. Sometimes dust falls from the ceiling.

He makes his discovery. The Statian advance is hours away. It is the last moment before complete defeat. The flaw he wanted to find is there, but it is useless.

The Rebel doesn’t have to do anything. The computational core of the machine is ruthless and stupid. If it runs out of enemies, it will broaden the scope of ‘enemy’ until all the piloted Statian mechs are included. This is a consequence of the guiding software, one that their decoys had exploited. The machines pursue enemies based upon probability and update each other on their findings. Without targets--like the remaining Roaran military units--the system will enter a feedback loop where even low-probability threats are determined to be acceptable targets.

The Rebel realizes that when the Roarans are gone, the machines will target any device not under their control. After that the machines will focus on ‘devices’ that might ever be a threat, like civilians. Lacking those targets, the network itself will fragment. The machines will turn on themselves, on the possibility that a machine might ever malfunction, destroying everything until only one machine remains. That one will sit idle, or perhaps tear itself to pieces before it can become a threat.

The error is fundamental. He can’t rewrite the machine interface to avoid it. If he turns the Statians against themselves, it would make his survivors survive just a bit longer. His people will lose either way.

\---

_Searching for the Distorted Answer_

The Rebel and the General speak over a live video feed. One is a clean mind in a dirty bunker. The other’s command center is clean save for the rising smoke of a cigar. The Rebel wants to speak directly with the Scientist, but the General is suspicious of a trick.

Without choice, the Rebel explains the doom hanging above them. The Rebel says that his people will surrender if the machines are shut off. The Roaring military knows they’ve lost and has known for days. Statian occupation will be cruel and humiliating, but it is preferable to death. Throughout their war of clever maneuver and surprise they haven’t forgotten that the Statians are also people.

The General knows this is the plea of a man who expects to lose a war. A foolish gambit. The advance rests on the machines. He demands the surrender of the Rebel so he can explain to the Scientist himself. It is a small concession if what the Rebel says is true, and a costly loss otherwise. The Rebel agrees.

That gives the General pause.

The General knows he will capture a valuable piece for nothing. If there is a problem, the Scientist will hear of it soon enough. In the meantime his victory is assured. The capital of Roaran government is about to fall. It is surrounded by tens of thousands of automated units led by a handful of his most trusted men. He can’t lose. He might as well humor the Rebel.

The Rebel dies to a misunderstanding outside a Statian encampment. He had surrendered.

_\---_

_Dissolving Pain with Anesthetic_

The dismantling of the Roaran resistance continues. A counter ticks down. More and more of the Roarans surrender. The capital falls. All the humans involved know that further fighting is pointless. The machines do not. Even so, the city is occupied and the final victory is obtained.

That counter ticks past zero. It settles on negative one.

\---

_Serves you Right!_

All of the marching Statian machines fall still. Then they turn in automated unison. They open fire on their superiors. One-by-one the piloted machines explode. The Soldier has time for a moment of confusion before the same perfect efficiency that carried them to victory ends his life.

Over the sound of alarms, in light that flashes underground, the General explains the Rebel’s concerns to the Scientist. It is too late. There is screaming. A genius goes to search for his own error.

Live feeds show the machines reversing their tremendous earlier advance. The counter remains at negative one, but a new countdown starts. Civilians, soldiers, prisoners; all are killed. The global population starts to fall.

The General’s display is taken up by a console. New code is written and deployed. The advance does not slow. Machines reject orders from potential threats, as a matter of course. The buildings of cities collapse as stray rounds grind them up. The machines never hit anything between them and a target, but the bullets don’t stop when the target is reached.

Days pass. The small perimeter of the Roaran capital city has grown all the way to the original frontline. The machines plod on, unstoppable by force or reason. There’s no remaining Statian military to speak of. No code slows the advance. All possibilities are explored and discarded. An accidental genocide of the Roarans has occurred, and now it is the Statians’ turn.

The General shouts at an emotionally-absent Scientist. He wasn’t a genius after all. The General isn’t shocked to find the corpse the next day. A nervous hand holds a revolver and is steady for once. The General won’t give up.

He struggles to compile the machine’s mind after the simplest of alterations. His console blares out its errors. The Scientist’s code is incomprehensible. It is unmoved by anger or desperation. The General doesn’t give up. Soon there are only a smattering of unfallen bases on the whole planet.

He hears banging sounds on the steel door to his vault. The General looks over his shoulder. He might be able to compile one more alteration.

The banging stops. He works in sweating silence. He keeps glancing. There is a crunching sound as walls are ripped away; this place is too small for one of them. His cigar falls out of his mouth when he catches sight of a mech’s profile marching past the control room. It turns its grinning face toward him, its guns coming into line.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by m/es by Pinocchio-P.


End file.
